The labor bureau’s Civil Rights Division began investigating and found no evidence to support Penner’s contention that the T-Girls disrupted business.

Instead, the bureau found substantial evidence of discrimination and tried to reach a settlement with Penner. When none was reached, Avakian took the case to a hearing.

Penner closed the Twilight Room Annex in April 2014 and laid off five employees after his bank accounts were seized in connection with the $400,000 judgment. The state also imposed $3,000 in civil penalties on Blachana and $2,000 on Penner.

Since Jan. 1, 2008, when the Equality Act took effect, the state labor bureau has received 24 complaints, only a handful of which have advanced to a hearing or remain under investigation. The majority of cases were closed for lack of substantial evidence, withdrawn because of a settlement or taken to state or federal court.

In a 2012 interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Penner said he is neither homophobic nor anti-transgender people. He once hosted a weekly queer dance night in the space, and a gay pool team has practiced in the bar. But, he said, other customers complained that the T-Girls left the stall doors open and seats up in the women’s restrooms. Business also had declined since the T-Girls started coming to the bar, he said.

In his appeal, Penner contended that he had not refused to provide service to anyone and that he had a constitutional right to express a desire that the T-Girls stop frequenting his business.

The court rejected the arguments, saying it agreed with Avakian that the voice messages were tantamount to denials of service.

“People think that A: We’re a tranny bar, or B: We’re a gay bar,” Penner said in the July 2012 message. “We are neither. People are not coming in because they just don’t want to be here on a Friday night now.”

[Complainant Cassandra] Lynn testified at a hearing before an administrative law judge that she could not sleep in the months after Penner’s voicemail. She was irritable at work and considered disbanding the group. Other girls said they stopped going out in public as women. They pulled away from friends, showed up late to work and gained weight.

… “The individuals had found a place at the P Club where they found they could share their lives, their stories. When that is stripped away, that is an indignity that is severe,” [Oregon state Labor Commissioner Brad] Avakian said.

An indignity so severe it prevents people from showing up to work on time? Really? I don’t believe a word of it. I am also skeptical that the state’s investigation found no evidence that the bar’s business went down after this large group of transgenders made it their Friday night gathering place. Most guys would find some other place to drink if their bar, which seems from context like it was something of a sports bar, became known as a transgender hangout, and probably most girls too, because who wants a penis person in the stall next to them in the ladies room?

Nevertheless, the state’s investigation found grounds to support the complainants, and no grounds to support the bar owner — who is now an ex-bar owner, because the lawsuit ruined him. Even if the state’s investigation was fairly done, and the bar owner truly broke the state’s anti-discrimination law in this case, consider that if a large group of men who dress like women decide to colonize your sports bar, and start using the ladies room, you have no grounds on which to ask them to leave. (And before you ask, I think that the owner of a lesbian bar should have the right to ask a large group of fraternity boys who frequented her bar to find somewhere else to drink.)

The reader who pointed me to this story adds:
Again, note. This is not a Christian whose conscience being violated, but a bar owner who complained because of what was being done to his bottom line. He got hit with a discrimination suit, nonetheless.

This is what happens at the state level when the LGBT lobby realizes some of its agenda. The public is obligated, under force of law and threat of punishment to regard any man who throws on a dress as a woman. Furthermore, the State wields an iron fist with a hair trigger, smashing down on any who do not agree, for whatever reason — whether because of Christian conscience or for purely secular, economic reasons.

The man is liable for $400,000 because he left those two ill-advised phone messages. His business is destroyed, and his employees, gay and straight both, are out of work. Good work, LGBT lobby. Good work, State of Oregon.

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78 Responses to Transgenders Take Down Bar

You’ve made a couple variations of the statement “Race is not morally equivalent to transgender. Category error.”.

That may or may not be true. Race is certainly *legally* equivalent to gender identity in the state of Oregon. That is what is in question here.

Also, I’m with those saying you should take down the picture you chose to attach to this article — I get that you didn’t understand there was a difference between transgender individuals and drag performers (thought it seems odd, given how long you lived in New York City!), but…. the difference is roughly equivalent to that between being black and performing in blackface. The choice of picture makes it easy to dismiss your position.

[NFR: Yes, I agree that it is so under Oregon law, but I find Oregon law to be unjust. Re: the photo, I’ll find one of Caitlyn Jenner. Everybody loves Caitlyn! — RD]

Clarification:
OK, now that I got that rant about stupid lawsuits and overblown judgments out of my system, let me say about the Penner case itself: if I were the judge I’d probably have found him guilty of (or liable for) discrimination, because technically, he was. He should have talked to the T girls about their behavior (which could easily have been driving away potential female customers on Friday nights) instead of leaving a message saying he was losing customers because he allowed them in and now people thought he was operating a “tranny bar.” That’s pretty clear. On the other hand, the alleged emotional toll the T girls claimed sounds like lawsuit fodder to me. I’d feel better about a suit that just said “He discriminated against us, dammit, we want him fined enough to make a point. Period.” But that’s not the way the game works. You have to manufacture some form of overblown emotional pain and suffering, and that’s what people do.

Bottom line: He should have been fined, but bringing the amount up to $400,000, ultimately forcing him out of business was excessive. Some of that may have been due to his own pigheadedness, but still. What are courts doing? “Moderation in all things” would be a good lesson for American courts to learn, whether they be criminal courts giving out excessive sentences or civil courts awarding $400,000, $500,000 and million-dollar judgments in these types of cases to compensate the wronged for essentially feeling bad. (Bodily injury and wrongful deaths are another matter.)

Beyond this, as I tried to say before, I don’t think LGBT anti-discrimination suits are any more outlandish as many, if not most, other lawsuits being brought. Or that the Courts — or the Oregon Labor Commission — favor LGBT suits. The evidence isn’t there. Brad Avakian just comes off as overly credulous in my humble opinion. You hope he isn’t really that gullible. Most “pain and suffering” claims are exaggerated, after all, a game.

Rob, the smugness isn’t helping your case — if you had ignorantly (in the actual sense of the words — I’m taking it as given that you really didn’t understand the difference between drag and gender identity) illustrated a story on Ta-Nehisi Coates with a picture of a minstrel show, the correct response on pointing this out would not be “I’ll find a picture of Michael Jordan, everyone likes him!”…

Can I ask you a question? Have you ever met a transgender individual (knowingly — remember that most transgender individuals want nothing more than to blend in and pass for what they believe they are, rightly or wrongly, so you may have done so without knowing many times)?

I feel like it would help the quality of your arguments, even if it didn’t change your position a whit…

The average person seeing that picture won’t be so forgiving, nor should they – it’s still up, well after Rod was informed by a reader exactly why it’s inaccurate. That decision speaks to the ethical and journalistic standards of TAC.

It speaks to an Orthodox understanding of gender.

A priest should know the difference between gay men who perform in drag and men suffering from gender dysphoria because his pastoral approach to individuals from each of these groups will differ.

But for the average layman, there’s no reason to distinguish between Bruce/Caitlyn and whoever’s in the picture up there. Both are men that ought to behave like men.

The entire objection is curious, in any event. It’s based on looking at the picture and saying, “Wait, that’s a drag queen, not a transgender person!” You ought to know better; it could be a female-to-male transsexual.

@Glaivester: I’ll be more precise. Though there are many differences between race and gender identity, they are alike in several respects:

(1) People generally cannot change their racial identity. People, including transgender people, generally cannot change their gender identity. (People can choose their gender presentation, but no one should have to).

(2) There is nothing morally wrong about belonging to a particular race. There is nothing morally wrong about having a particular gender identity or with expressing the gender identity one has. (The latter claim may be controversial, but it shouldn’t be.)

(3) There is a long, ugly history of people being discriminated against, oppressed, and sometimes murdered because of their race. There is a long, ugly history of people being discriminated against, oppressed, and sometimes murdered because of their gender identity.

(4) In light of (1), (2), and (3), it makes sense to have laws and social norms protecting people of different races and gender identities from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

… there appear to be countless people here who are quite willing to criminalize men using women’s bathrooms as rapists, perverts, and a threat to the mental stability of females. I have no doubt that all these accusations of bathroom assault are about as credible as the fabricated stories of campus rape. But it’s very strange to see putative conservatives acquiescing in the criminalization of men.
Women have always used these kinds of imaginary fears to take power away from men and portray their sexuality as depraved, ‘aggressive’, and dangerous.

Dude. We’re “criminalizing” rape. This is your idea of normal male sexuality? This is really creepy.

When Father Seraphim Rose wrote back in the early 60’s that liberalism is the breeding ground for more advanced forms of nihilism he absolutely saw the direction the West was headed. Just as many of us traditional religious types saw that civil unions would eventually lead to homosexual marriage and a redefinition of marriage and family. Now I’m saying the next step will be the repeal of the first amendment under the guise of LGBTQ rights and churches, mosques and synagogues will be coerced to change their doctrines or be shut down. Zorro thinks I’m delusional for seeing the writing on the wall.

Well, now I know what bar to avoid next time I’m in Portland. (Portland is not a place I’d visit for fun, it is very much not my kind of city, but for some reason it seems to be a popular site for scientific conferences).

Wow. OK, well, I guess if rights should attach to qualities obvious at birth, that disposes of the whole problem of religious liberty, since religion is not carried in the DNA but is conferred or acquired after birth

How religious you are actually is mostly influenced by DNA rather than by upbringing (upbringing really seems to matter incredibly little for most things), but that aside, you are correct. It’s also irrelevant though. The reasons for banning racial discrimination (and for that matter discrimination on gender identity) are entirely separate from the ones for banning religious discrimination. The reason we don’t allow racial discrimination is because we consider it unfair to hold people responsible for a condition they were born with. Religious discrimination is different, since religion is in the last analysis a choice: it’s not inherently unfair for the state to want to give special privilege to particular religions, and many countries do so today, without too much popular outrage. The reason we don’t allow religious discrimination in America isn’t because of unfairness, but rather because of considerations about social peace: America was formed about a century and a quarter after the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, and the founders wanted to avoid the problem of irresolvable social conflicts that can arise when the state favours one religion.

(I do wonder if he’s related to the crazy loon who styled himself Chairman of the dozen or so people who made up the “revolutionary communist party” — whose father was a California superior court judge.)

Oh, I thought I was the only one who immediately thought of Bob Avakian and his RCP-USA.

Transgenderism is not the same category as race, but more like a political group. Let’s accept this, ad argumendum.

You know what else is more like a political group than a race, and yet is protected by civil rights laws? Religion.

So, let’s say that a group of church ladies congregates after Church in some Bay area coffeeshop. The coffeeshops other clients lean heavy on the LGBTQ side of things, and start complaining that their presence there violates their safe space.*** The coffee shop owner leaves them a message saying that people start thinking his cofeeshop is some kind of fundie central, and he can’t have that. Should civil rights protect the church ladies group or not? The more “race realist” readers here would probably say that all civil rights laws should go out the window, but I am curious what people who don’t have that position think..

*** Yes, this is an extremely far fetched scenario. But here’s the thing: if you take all the grousing about the coming persecution of Christians in the US seriously ,this kind of low level harrasment is exactly the form it will take. The fact that despite all this anxiety, Rod and other still presume that they are on the side of the “normals” harrassed by freaks shows that these scenarios are still a long way from becoming reality- at least outside the dreaded humanities departments…

A bar owner has wide leeway to bar patrons that are disruptive and may put them on the wrong side of the liquor control commission. Disorderly conduct, like open peeing in the banos, is grounds for being 86’d. It sounds like the guy was an idiot and a bunch of hysterics are goading a bunch of idiot beurocrats. For a couple of hundred bucks he could have hired a lawyer who would have told him how to legally bar patrons that are a potential liability, but instead he goes it alone and then wants to be a social media martyr.

word to the Christian and to the exasperated: You can be as innocent as a dove and as wise as a serpent—just find an attorney to help you dress what you want to do in a cloak of defensibility. Sometimes you will be told no, but if you’d start with a conversation you’d be on solid ground when you decided to take your stand (or not).

Rod: You’ve made a couple variations of the statement “Race is not morally equivalent to transgender. Category error.”.

Jim Wise: That may or may not be true.

If you think that race might be equivalent to transgenderism, you are obviously willing to believe ridiculous things so anything you say canb e taken with a grain of salt.

Race is certainly *legally* equivalent to gender identity in the state of Oregon. That is what is in question here.

(a) Then the point is, the law is stupid and we should be up in arms about it.

(b) Regardless of whether he broke the law, the fine is excessive and destroying a man’s livelihood over this is insane. He should sue Oregon under the fourteenth amendment incorporation of the eighth amendment, and if the ACLU doesn’t help him, they ought to be run out of town on a rail for not defending the constitution.

(c) Everyone who loses a business to this sort of thing needs to find a way to get on every form of welfare they can and to have as many kids as possible and get them on welfare too. Let’s bankrupt states like Oregon and let’s let our side start using welfare as a weapon to dispossess leftists like they are using it against us.

Reading the opinion from the Oregon Court of Appeals, you see that the $400,000 is split among 11 people — still a windfall, but not quite the same kind — and that the bar owner didn’t appeal the calculation of this damages award at all. Instead, the appeal is mostly about whether his call not to come back was actually a denial of service, or instead just an expression of opinion (and thus protected by the Oregon analogue to the First Amendment).

Apparently, his theory was that the call wasn’t enough, instead they’d have to have come back despite the call and then been denied service in order to have a claim for discrimination.

[NFR: For the business owner, $400,000 destroyed his business. That’s the point. — RD]

Post-modern “social liberalism” is essentially nihilistic egotism posturing as “fighting for equality”, made obvious by their enshrinement of sexual desires and self-perceptions as “groups of person stripped of BASICEST RIGHTS”, no matter how many rights they have to make up to do so.

” The reason we don’t allow religious discrimination in America isn’t because of unfairness, but rather because of considerations about social peace: America was formed about a century and a quarter after the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, and the founders wanted to avoid the problem of irresolvable social conflicts that can arise when the state favours one religion.”

Not exactly. This is for sure the reason why the 1st amendment exists, but its not really a sufficient answer to the question of why religion is a protected class for purposes of public accomodation in civil rights legislation. There, “fairness” or rather examination of historical patterns around which various sorts of discrimination occured, are a key element of the answer (as was simple politicking: Catholics and Jewish rabbis were instrumental in setting up the Civil Rights coalition- and they had a historical memory of being maligned by mainstream).

My knee-jerk emotional response is in accord with Glaivester: to equate race and transgender is stupid. But, you can’t make or expound laws based on such emotional impulses. Otherwise, someone will take your latest expostulation and apply it in an unexpected way, which is why we have to beware of the law of unintended consequences.

OK, let’s start with race. There is a very specific history dealing with “race” in the Americas. Although there has been tribal and ethnic rivalry throughout human history, our modern notions of “race” are only 500 years old, albeit the Brahmin proscription of darker-skinned “untouchables” in India, and the Japanese “eta” class, have some parallels.

So, our culture and legal systems spent a good three centuries digging ourselved deep into a hole called “race,” and when God finally brought us to our senses at a cost of 600,000 dead, among other prices — eloquently summarized in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — we began making a somewhat inconsistent effort to counter three centuries of statute, case law, and cultural habits by constitutional amendments, statutes, and cultural efforts to push hard the other way.

Some of these efforts were framed in broad principles of humanity and citizenship, rather than specific “blacks now get this, that and the other,” and in general, that was good. The Fourteenth Amendment has done more to protect the liberties of “white people” than it has for “black people.” There should be some broad principles to a constitutional amendment. If someone came up with a rationale for enslaving white people with an IQ less than 100, well, that is unconstitutional also.

But, broad principles can lend themselves to perverse MAD Lib games. Write a sentence about equal protection, leave a blank for the class to be protected, and then any noun or class-defining adjective written into the blank becomes a valid legal argument.

Take sex, f’rinstance. Just men and women, we won’t get into QWERTY just yet. The Fourteenth Amendment did not, in fact, enfranchise women, partly because the Fifteenth Amendment specified “male.” But another constitutional amendment did. Wisely, it provided that the right to vote shall not be restricted on account of sex. It did not say that in EVERY respect both sexes shall be treated exactly alike. Thus, labor protective laws can take cognizance of the fact that women’s skeletal and muscular structure makes it more dangerous for a woman to lift a heavy crate over her head than for a man to do so — not that both don’t need protection from exploitation by ruthless employers, but not identical protection. Likewise, it left open that men and women have sound reasons for preferring not to disrobe in the presence of members of the opposite sex, so, when we got rid of separate restrooms for “white” and “colored,” we did not have to abolish segregating restrooms by sex.

OK, transgender. Biochemistry is imprecise. Its pretty obvious that distinct sexes only exist because it was a good reproductive strategy. Most of us are constituted consistent with that purpose, distinctly male or female — whether we actually seek or find a sexual partner or not, and marry them or don’t. But a few among us are more ambiguous, and it is reasonably enlightened that we all accept that these ambiguous individuals have only one life to live, and they have to live with the cards they were dealt.

Is this the moral, ethical, legal, or cultural equivalent of “racial equality”? Not hardly. The prejudices involved (and there are some) arose for different reasons, in different contexts. Dark skin doesn’t really need “accommodation” so much as redress to balance past wrongs. LGBTQWERTY needs accommodation — not to balance past wrongs so much as to give individuals a bit of social space to live.

Inherently, there will be some cultural separation. Gay people who go to bars full of heterosexuals will be deeply resented if they start hitting on people of their own sex who prefer the company of the opposite sex. They need to go to bars where they can be reasonably sure that those of the opposite sex are not interested, and those of their own sex will appreciate the attention. Etc. etc. etc.

Rigid “equality” statutes miss a lot of such subtle nuances, because the law is a blunt instrument. Oregon probably needs to re-examine its law. A bar that is trying to create a certain “atmosphere” is a bit different from a grocery store. People don’t go to a grocery store for “atmosphere.” They go to buy their week’s groceries and go home. A big impersonal Holiday Inn is a bit different from a Bed and Breakfast where the hosts are inviting guests to their own table for breakfast, more or less.

This Avakian guy, whether he is the Son of Chairman Bob or not, is only an administrative law judge. ALJs, or whatever term they may be known by, have their uses. But when an ALJ gives free reign to their personal imagination as this guy did, his ruling certainly should be appealed to a real court where more rigorous standards would be applied.

The advice that the bar owner should consult a lawyer first, and learn the legal sustainable ways to make common sense restrictions in their clientele is also sound. You can make or break your case by how you present it to the world.

Now, back to “black” and “da club.” It is true that after generations of enforced separation, there are distinct “black” subcultures, some less savory than others. Most people looking for “da club” do not hang out at Planet Hollywood or Hardrock Cafe. But if some begin to… focus on behavior, not color. Be fully prepared to welcome the upper middle class black couple while chasing the gangsters out. The rub comes when someone says that being loud and rude and violent and smoking a joint “is what black culture is” and by discrimination against innately “black” behavior you are discriminating on the basis of race, because “white” people are never rude like that.

At that point, you are dealing with a situation much more like the transgender people who want to act outlandish, disrupt the quiet enjoyment for other patrons, and spray the bathrooms in patent violation of public health considerations. There are good grounds for telling either, both, or all to get out and stay out, without the likes of Avakian calling it “inequality” or “discrimination.”

(Incidentally, Chairman Bob and his Maoist cronies considered homosexuality to be a symptom of degenerate capitalism, which would disappear after the revolution.)

> “If you think that race might be equivalent to transgenderism, you are obviously willing to believe ridiculous things so anything you say canb e taken with a grain of salt.”

OK, let’s look at how race and gender identity might be the same or different.

As commonly understood in America today, gender identity is, like race, imparted at birth, and beyond the ability of the individual to control. In addition, we don’t consider an individual morally inferior for belonging to one gender or another.

If one agrees with these three ideas, it is entirely consistent (whether or not it is correct) to consider gender identity in the same category as race.

If one or more of these ideas is not correct, then it might not be — which of the above do you consider incorrect?

(As Rob points out above, the fact that there is, on the ground, a long history of discrimination and sometimes violence against the transgendered is another similarity between gender identity and race, which is why these laws exist in the first place.)

“Long Live the Teachings of Chairman Bob!
[NFR: I thought of him too. I used to read his propaganda with the same horrified fascination with which I would read Chick tracts. — RD]”

I ran across one of Jack Chick’s comic tracts at Harbor Freight yesterday. He’s still promoting salvation and however horrified some might be, people are getting converted, even if they’re not the intellectual in-group who read and post here. The odd thing is, the Christian theology in the tracts is as orthodox as what Rod call traditional belief, shared among a wide array of believers who reject liberalism’s disbelief.

The reason we don’t allow religious discrimination in America isn’t because of unfairness, but rather because of considerations about social peace…..

Hector, that’s interesting, but it just confirms my point: there are things we see people as having a right to be that are not present or obvious at birth. The fact that someone is born a certain way is one, but not the only, basis on which an enlightened society will ground its concept of rights. (I realize you know this already, but apparently some other people here don’t.)

Persons of one biological sex who consider that they have a ‘gender identity’ stereotypically associated with the other sex do suffer discrimination and need protection. A problem arises, however, when ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ are confused, to the extent that male-bodied persons gain a right to enter spaces set aside for women. In such a case a clash of rights is created. Persons who wish to express a gender identity not usually stereotypically associated with their biological sex need to be accommodated in ways that protect them, but do not conflict with the rights of women.

As commonly understood in America today, gender identity is, like race, imparted at birth, and beyond the ability of the individual to control….

If one agrees with these three ideas, it is entirely consistent (whether or not it is correct) to consider gender identity in the same category as race.

If one or more of these ideas is not correct, then it might not be — which of the above do you consider incorrect?

Why does one of those ideas have to be incorrect for the issues to be different? I reject the idea that just because something is outside of one’s control it means it is in the same category as other things outside one’s control.

In addition, we don’t consider an individual morally inferior for belonging to one gender or another.

Huh? The issue is not whether or not males or females are inferior, the issue is someone being convinced they are really a different gender than their anatomy.

For those of you upset about confusing drag queens and transgendered people, let’s remember that Rod is the guy who thought the perfect illustration for a post about people policing other people and punishing them for PC violations was two women in some sort of boardroom domination fantasy, one of them bent over a table (both fully clothed, lest Rod seem TOO naive).